Perfect Place

Derrick Scocchera

BY Vish KhannaPublished Feb 21, 2008

Though full of cool art school shots and lovely, noir-ish tones, A Perfect Place is ultimately a useless short film. Stylistically, there’s very little to criticise about the 25 minutes of beautiful black and white that director Derrick Scocchera has captured here. The action begins in a run-down apartment, where a card game is suddenly halted when Tom (Mark Boone Junior) loses his shit on the Cheat (Todd Lookinland), walloping him in the head with Dennis’s (Bill Moseley) bass guitar. Much to Dennis’s frustration, he needs a scheme to get rid of the Cheat’s body. He tells Tom that he’s thought of "a perfect place” near the highway to bury the evidence and comes up with a plan to borrow a car belonging to a quirky elderly woman who lives in his building. There’s a good stretch here where Scocchera simply pays tribute to David Lynch — the stark, stilted dialogue, the oddly innocent widow clinging to her late husband’s bow-tie collection, and the spooky shots of a car weaving its lonely way down a lost highway. Then there’s Mike Patton’s score, the prolific musician’s first foray into setting a film to music. Clearly relishing his role, Patton includes as much static and incidental radio noise as he can fit beneath the dialogue, while transitional sequences feature submerged jazz flourishes, Ed Wood-esque Martian movie sounds and a recurring track of metropolitan clatter. There’s an overall sense of forced weirdness here, however, and the film’s hack comedy conclusion makes the whole exercise that much more moot. Plus: Trailer.
(Fantoma Films)

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